Lord Falconer: assisted suicide law fails to protect or punish

Vulnerable people who want to end their lives are being let down by a system
that offers them no protection while leaving their relatives at risk of
prosecution, Lord Falconer warns today as he prepares to publish an
important new report on the case for changing the law on assisted dying.

The peer and barrister, who served as Tony Blair’s Lord Chancellor, writes in The Daily Telegraph that the rarely used law against aiding suicide only favours those terminally ill people with the money and support to see their final wishes carried out.

Meanwhile others are being forced to take their lives early rather than facing the worry of their loved ones being arrested for helping them if they became incapable.

He says that even if “patchy” care for the terminally ill were improved in hospitals and hospices around the country, there would still be some who wanted to die at the time of their choosing “rather than face a period of reduced function and independence in their final illness”.

But Lord Falconer, who has chaired the independent commission on assisted dying that reports on Thursday, says that his experts “did not like much of what they saw” at Dignitas, the Swiss clinic where more than 160 Britons have been given legal help to die in “alien surroundings” over the past decade.

He also raises concerns about the regimes in other countries and states that have legalised some form of assisted suicide or euthanasia, such as Oregon where patients must take 90 pills or the Netherlands where even teenagers and people with mental illnesses are given help by doctors to kill themselves.

Instead, Lord Falconer’s commission is likely to recommend that the law on assisted suicide should be changed in England and Wales to remove the threat of prosecution for medics and relatives acting out of compassion to end an ill person’s suffering, but also to protect disabled people from feeling pressurised into taking their lives. Safeguards could include patients having to seek the opinion of two independent doctors to certify their mental capacity and desire to die before writing a prescription for a lethal dose of drugs, and then having to wait through a “cooling-off period” before receiving the drugs in case they change their minds.

Lord Falconer writes: “The system as it stands is one that outlaws an action and yet frequently allows it to take place unpunished without employing any safeguards to protect and support people at a vulnerable stage in their lives.

“The evidence identified so many problems with the current framework, but also legitimate concerns about the possible consequences of change.

“We have tried to provide a reasoned analysis of the problems, and a possible way forward, which addresses the need for safeguards.”

His comments have been echoed this weekend by Lord Blair of Boughton, the former Metropolitan Police commissioner, and Baroness Warnock, Britain’s foremost moral philosopher, and Thursday’s report will add to the pressure on Parliament to consider properly a subject that has a “profound effect” on whether or not people’s “last days on earth are bearable”.

Political leaders have shied away from calling for the law to be relaxed, not least for fear of angering religious groups and disability campaigners who believes it amounts to the declaration by society that some lives are not worth living.

But there is a growing acceptance that the current legal situation is a mess.

Aiding or abetting suicide remains punishable by up to 14 years’ imprisonment under the 1961 Suicide Act, yet in recent decades police had tended to avoid prosecutions unless it was clear that a victim was coerced or the assister had wanted to profit from their death.

A landmark High Court case brought in 2009 by a woman with Multiple Sclerosis, Debbie Purdy, ordered the Director of Public Prosecutions to set out guidelines stating clearly when people would and would not end up in court for assisting a suicide.

Since then 31 cases have been considered by the DPP but not a single one has led to a prosecution, as all have been judged to have been motivated by compassion.

Lord Falconer says it means that the rich who can travel to Switzerland, and disabled people who have someone to help them, are able to end their lives relatively easily while others end up carrying out botched suicide attempts at home.

Yet all know that anyone who aids them will face a lengthy police investigation and the risk of jail, at a time when they should be grieving.

“No one should have to face death in this manner,” Lord Falconer writes.

After failed attempts to relax the law in the House of Lords failed, in recent years the calls for change have come not from politicians but often from ordinary people who have watched spouses, parents or children suffer, and increasingly from respected public figures.

The author Sir Terry Pratchett, who has early-onset dementia, has funded the commission on assisted dying, which has been run by the left-leaning think-tank Demos.

Sir Patrick Stewart, the actor, and Ian McEwan, the author, have also become vocal supporters of the pressure group Dignity in Dying.

The BBC has been accused of acting as a “cheerleader” for assisted suicide after it broadcast the final moments of Sir Peter Smedley, a millionaire hotelier, as he drank a lethal dose of barbiturates at a Dignitas clinic.

Lord Falconer’s commission took evidence from 40 expert witnesses and heard statements from 1,200 people including the parents of Daniel James, a teenager paralysed while playing rugby who chose to end his life at Dignitas rather than lead a “second-class existence”.

But the inquiry has faced accusations that it is biased, and groups including the British Medical Association and the anti assisted suicide group Care Not Killing declined to take part.

A spokesman for Care Not Killing said: “This is a deeply worrying and flawed report that is being presented as a serious investigation into this complicated and divisive issue, it is not.

"The report does not add a single new argument, or fact to the debate on assisted suicide and euthanasia. It was paid for by the supporters of euthanasia and nine of the 12 members on the commission are known backers of changing the law. At the same time those with a different view were excluded from taking part, which was why many individuals and organisations refused to take part.

“Unsurprisingly the report’s authors have decided to call for legalisation of assisted suicide and euthanasia, which could lead to around 13,000 deaths a year, putting the lives of many disabled and vulnerable people at risk.

“The current law exists to protect the vulnerable, elderly and disabled from being pressured, or feeling under pressure to ending their lives because they are either a financial or care burden. The fact that the sanctions available to the court have rarely been applied show that it acts as a powerful deterrent.”